Glossika’s “Mass Sentence Method”

OK so here’s a new thing I’m trying. As I’ve mentioned, my biggest problem is speech. I can understand most of what I hear, and I can read the things I need/want to be able to for the most part (and I know how I’ll be improving that over the next ~11 months). My writing is OK, and I’ll be working on that even more with a tutor starting next term. But my speaking is just not there yet.

I have no problem getting my meaning across in most any situation, but the problem is that I never feel sure if I’m saying things right. Or maybe I know that what I’m saying is correct, but people still look at me funny and say things like “Oh, you can just say X.” Sometimes they just don’t know what I mean, or I think I’m saying one thing but what they understand is something else. This boils down to the fact that 1) I’m not comfortable enough with putting fluid, correct sentences out yet, and 2) I need to learn to say things the way native speakers would, rather than expressing things the way an American would, but in Chinese. The biggest problem though is that I just can’t spit out Chinese. I have to think about it, I make a lot of unnatural pauses, say “怎麼講” a lot, etc. I can’t, as they say in Chinese, just 脫口而出.

So to that end, I’m trying a method that Mike Campbell (Glossika on YouTube and Facebook) has talked about in some of his videos. His Chinese is unbelievable, and he says he developed this method while learning Chinese and uses it to learn other languages and to teach people English at his school here in Taipei. From what I understand, his students pay a serious amount of money to study at his school, so I think these factors all add up to someone we should pay attention to.

What I understand of his method is this. First he buys books containing thousands of sentences in parallel format. For our purposes, the best thing that’s out there are for learning English, not Chinese, but as long as the MP3 recordings contain both languages, it’s fine. Second, he goes through and records himself reading these sentences. 500 per day. I currently shoot for somewhere in between 100 and 200, but I’m trying to figure out ways to make it go more efficiently so I can record more. Then over the next several days he reviews them, repeating after the tape when he can. After he’s gone through the entire book, he goes through and does it all again, a total of 2 or 3 times.

He claims that a good base level can be achieved after 10,000 sentences (sounds like a familiar number), but that after 20,000 sentences, your <insert language here> should be really good. I take that to mean 20,000 different sentences, rather than, for example, 5 repetitions each of 4000 sentences, because when he talks about numbers of repetitions he tends to add a zero. I’ve collected several of these books now, and I do have about 20,000 sentences ready and waiting. I have a book of 10,000 sentences besides this, but probably won’t use it because the MP3 recordings don’t contain Chinese (more on this in a moment).

Mike says that the most important thing is that it gets your tongue moving, and I agree. But another big thing for me is that listening to myself speak really brings focus to the errors I make. I listen to it every day for a week, and every time I hear X error, it makes me mad, and I end up saying that sentence a few times so I get it right. So double bonus there.

I feel like this method is already helping a bit, but it’s too soon to know for sure. I plan on sticking with it for at least a few weeks to see how it goes, because I think this really has promise. There’s something about it, and I think part of it is that you’re involving more senses while doing the recordings, and then invoking that by reviewing. You could just listen to the MP3s that come with the book, but you have no connection to that. When you’ve recorded the MP3s yourself, you remember sitting there recording it. You remember when you flubbed that sentence three times before you got it right, you remember that the thud you just heard on the recording was when you dropped the book, etc. All those associations come back, which I think helps to make stronger connections with the material. And while you’re recording, you hear the native speaker say the sentence, you hear and feel yourself repeating the sentence, and you see the sentence written on the page. Using more senses helps to reinforce the neural connections, which helps you to learn better (score for having an awesome teacher for a wife, who talks about these things).

He talks a lot about muscle memory, and I think that’s a huge point. You say something correctly enough times, and it’s going to feel wrong to say it incorrectly. There’s other stuff happening here too though. By looking at the English, you’re turning the sentence into comprehensible input, even if you don’t know one of the words. So you’re essentially feeding your brain a ton of comprehensible sentences in a very focused way, and then repeating them, which involves all those processes I mentioned above. Then when you review, you can do it all over again, only the fact that you don’t have English on your own recordings forces you to recall the meaning, enhancing the connections even further.

As an aside, I don’t think this is the most suitable method if there tend to be a few words you don’t know in most sentences, because it’s too much for your brain to pick up in such a short period of time. I could be wrong, but Mike himself says the method is for people who already know the target language well, and that you should use another method to get yourself to that point. I definitely see the logic there and agree, though I feel like some of this method can be successfully adapted to other materials to get you to this point. I haven’t thought through that yet, but if this goes well I may do something like that for Japanese.

Now, here’s what I believe I’m doing differently than Mike. I think he just reads the sentences aloud himself, without the aid of a recording of a native speaker. I may be wrong about this, but that’s what I gather from the videos I’ve seen. I’m using Audacity to add silences to the recordings after the native speaker reads each sentence (or more accurately, I’m muting the English sentences because I don’t need them, which leaves a space of silence after the Chinese sentences). Then I put the track onto my phone. While listening to the MP3 through earphones so the recording I’m making doesn’t pick it up, I repeat the sentences into Audacity. I can do this more or less on the fly, stopping only to re-record when I make a mistake. Then using Audacity I edit the silences out of my recording, leaving only enough space to repeat after it while reviewing later. There’s a plug-in that comes with Audacity that does this. Doing all this takes more time, but I think it’s worth it because then I’m modeling a native speaker rather than starting from my own conception of how a sentence should sound.

Things you have to be careful about: One, some of these books have direct translations of the English rather than an equivalent Chinese phrase. You don’t want that, because it’s just explaining the English rather than telling you how a Chinese-speaker would express the same thing. Two, some of them don’t have Chinese on the recordings, because again, they’re books for learning English, not for learning Chinese. That last bit is a good thing because you know the Chinese will be correct since it’s written by a native speaker (some of these books written solely by Taiwanese people have absolutely horrendous English), but on the other hand, sometimes they don’t see the need to include Chinese, so you have to look out. You won’t always know until you get the thing home either, so it’s a bit of trial and error.

So we’ll see how this goes. I think there’s a lot of potential here, and I’m excited to see if it works as well as I think it might. I’ll report back here.

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23 thoughts on “Glossika’s “Mass Sentence Method””

Looks like a great method, good find, however I usually lack the willpower for these “brute force” type of study techniques, even though I know they’re probably a lot more effective than what I normally do. Looking forward to seeing how it goes, as my oral is still so far behind reading and listening comprehension. By the way, do you happen to have links to any of the books you’re using–preferably from sites that ship to North America?

I thought a bit more about the “brute force” thing. I used to feel the same way about this method. In fact, I’ve known about it for about 8 months and am just now getting around to actually doing it, even though the idea really appealed to me when I first learned about it. It can be really tedious, and I have a bit of an aversion to that sort of work (I’ve all but abandoned flash cards at this point).

But at this point my need to improve in this aspect is overriding my dislike of the study method. Add to that the fact that it really seems to be helping, and I have no problem making myself get up a little earlier to do these recordings. The results are motivating, even if the work itself isn’t.

I definitely need to give it a whirl, then. It just seems so bloody time consuming, but then if it replaced my use of flashcards (on which I spend about 30 minutes a day), it wouldn’t be so bad. Of course, flash cards can be done fairly passively on a bus or whatever, whereas you really need to plug in and focus for this method.

So now that you’ve ditched flashcards (a common move among higher level learners from what I gather) how are you ensuring you retain new words? Obviously words you learn in class will adhere naturally, but what about the rest? Imron and others on Chineseforums say reading becomes a “natural” SRS after a while, but I question that because you’d need to read a LOT for low frequency words to pop back up. For me since the flashcards are done in otherwise “dead” time e.g. walking to work, it’s not too onerous, but I do dream of a day I can put the deck down!

I don’t recommend giving up SRS. It was a gradual thing with me, where eventually my extreme dislike of doing it surpassed my desire to keep up with previously studied vocabulary. I do plan to review said vocabulary occasionally, but through re-reading old lessons or listening to their MP3s, not by doing flashcards. It’s funny, but lessons that were quite difficult to learn in the first place are now quite easy, so they only take a few minutes to go back through. I’m also using the example sentences for the vocabulary from some of the textbooks as material for this “Mass Sentence Method” experiment.

Of course, the vocabulary I need for my field gets reviewed more than enough through reading the books I’ve been reading, but I feel the other stuff slipping a bit. I just really hate doing SRS reps. I’ll probably have to start doing them again next term, when I begin/continue studying The Independent Reader, which contains some 5000+ vocabulary words.

I’d like to do experiment with it as well. Could you list the textbooks you are using/will use? 简体字 is preferrable but I’d be thankful for any recommendation. ( I trie finding a list from Mr Campbell’s videos/posts, but couldn’t. Does he list any?) And thanks for this awesome post!

I mentioned a few books in the comments above. I can’t help you with simplified characters, as I try to avoid them whenever possible. Mike Campbell doesn’t give any recommendations in his videos, unfortunately, but I believe he’s coming out with his own series of books soon.

I’m in the US. However,I’ve found one for Japanese that has about 16,000 sentences in it. It has really great content. I were to order one of the following, which would you recommend? Or would you recommend some other? BTW, having the audio is not important to me, I just would like a quality book with quality sentences.

I can’t even tell you what a big mistake it is to ignore the audio. I don’t really have time to go into it, but google Idahosa Ness and read some of his stuff, hopefully it will convince you otherwise.

I don’t know the first book you mentioned, the second is great, and the third OK.

I like this book made for Chinese language students published by 北京大学出版社. It covers 4000 sentences in 12 areas of interest, broken into 68 chapters. The 68 mp3 files are Chinese only and fast paced, so that the entire 4000 sentences only takes 2h55m. Most topics are covered by several sentences with slightly changing vocabulary (transformation and a little bit of substitution). The book presents each sentence in 简体字, Pinyin, and English. It’s about 35 RMB on Amazon.cn.

汉语常用口语句典:生活情景卷(附MP3光盘1张)
A Handbook of Spoken Chinese Sentences

It sounds like this is only the first book in a series of three, but I could not find the other two yet.

I tested this method with French. What Mike doesn’t speak about is his review system. For some reason I can’t find my files anymore, but I had extracted a list of sentences from an Anki deck (sentences read by a native French speaker) and I was reading I think 200 a day, and recording myself. I think this took about 2 hours each time because I read the English first, then the French. What is amazing is that so many patterns repeat on a constant basis, that as you are reading you catch similar grammar over and over and over. So it’s like speaking for 2 hours a day in the language (correctly). I lost motivation at the time and stopped after I think 3,500 sentences for personal reasons, and I also didn’t understand how I could review literally 12-15 hours of audio. Initially I used “sleep immersion” to playback my readings while I was sleeping, but I’d love to hear thoughts on a review system for say, 10,000 sentences of audio.

Sorry it took so long to reply—I’ve been focused on what we’re doing at Outlier (www.outlier-linguistics.com) and haven’t checked this blog in a long time!

I’d recommend using Glossika’s French course. It wasn’t available when I wrote this post, but it is now. Of course, it’s only 3000 sentences, not 10,000, but their courses are excellent. I’m using their courses for Japanese and Cantonese right now, and I intend to use the French course when I return to French. If you’re technically inclined at all, there’s a really cool tool for making an Anki deck from a Glossika course here: https://gitlab.com/avorobey/glossika-tools

I guess we’ve got a few things in common.
You have learnt Chinese, i’m learning. You’re learning Japanese, i’ve just started. You want to get back to learning French, i want to start. Do you plan on studying Korean?